Faith and current events.

[xp_olaris]

Apparently Father Morgan and Nathan watch the same news programming. Today we got treated to a nice long sermon about the difference between literal interpretation and actual truth in the Bible. Babel, as I'm sure you can imagine, featured heavily.

Don't get me wrong, I like Fr. Morgan and the bit about how the ark story is a chiasm (I'm so mangling that I'm sure) was pretty cool. But I'm not really sure that the blue-hairs appreciated being told that they were being irresponsible to expect our idea of history to be the same as ancient writers.

Anyway, did you know that no one is quite sure how to pronounce Babel? Not even Fr. Morgan who went through, I swear, four different pronunciations in 15 minutes.

Comments

[xp_daytripper]

'Babel' comes from the Babylonian: 'bab' meaning gate and 'ili', meaning 'God', so it's literally "The Gate Of God". Pronunciation's hard to work out, since Babylonian's one of those dead languages and even tho' I used to know it pretty well before I blew my brain up, I learned to read it, not speak it, so yeah, can't help you with the correct version.

[x-forge.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I got a good sit-down talk with my mother and the pastor after Church when I was twelve after I pointed out that the directions God gave Noah for the ark were rather inefficient and I'd come up with a better design.

We switched churches after that.

[x-cypher.livejournal.com]

I'd give him my best pronunciations, but given that I have no ancient Babylonians to compare my accent to, I suppose there's no way of knowing if it's right or not.